Having said these things I want to focus on this notion of “acting” – of being active. We are active when we deliberately process and try to understand our interactions with the world. We are passive when there is no such inner process, and we merely respond automatically. An example will clarify.
Let’s say you were expecting a promotion at work, but someone else got it. The chances are that this will make you feel diminished, unhappy – or to use the technical term, pissed off. Most of us will feel miserable to some extent. Maybe we start to complain about the boss and say derogatory things about the person who got the promotion. Our inner state just reacts automatically, and perhaps we become depressed or fly into a rage. Either way, there is no active mentation taking place, just a response to events that have not gone our way. We are passive, with no inner power to understand.
There is another way of dealing with a situation like this. First of all, we can look at our feeling of disappointment. Yes, of course, we are going to feel disappointed. A better job with more money automatically registers within us as better survival prospects. The sense of loss will subconsciously cause feelings of loss to arise. But we can look at it, reason and understand – “I feel diminished because my survival prospects have not been enhanced in the way I expected.” It sounds a bit mechanical, but this is the sort of analysis that needs to take place. Acting in this way the mind becomes active – it has more power, and this inner activity will bring about a certain amount of pleasure. We can then go on to look at the fact that we became unhappy because at that moment in time there was going to be absolutely no other response. We do not have free will, and so there is no reason for regret or remorse.
I’m trying to explain in less than a thousand words what takes years to understand and master. However, hopefully, you get the gist. In any situation, we can either be active or passive.
The Stoics had a similar philosophy, and Spinoza was influenced by them. But the essence of the whole thing is to use reason and understanding in situations where we would otherwise be passive – and suffer.
The reason for doing this kind of work is to reduce suffering and take pleasure in our inner power. If a person is happy to be passive in life and to suffer accordingly, then there is no reason to consider becoming active at all.
WHAT ARE YOU PROTECTING?
I’ve had quite a lot of experience running groups and seminars (business related), and being part of a group. In such a setting people invariably become very defensive, and typically unwilling to share experiences or contribute ideas. It’s like they are still at school with a teacher that humiliates anyone who gets the answers to teacher’s questions wrong. Such humiliation is clearly diminishing, making a person feel inferior to others.
We all grow up protecting our ego, and if necessary will do so through violence. The opinions of others are so important to most of us that we would rather do anything than look a fool or inadequate in some way. I saw a picture of someone who had collapsed in a Parisian street, and of course no one came to his aid. Someone said that he probably wouldn’t help either because it could be a mime. So let’s pretend it is a mime, and you get suckered in. The mime makes you look like some gullible fool. Does it matter? If it does this says something about you, and specifically that you are highly dependent on other people’s opinions. This is slavery.
The alternative to this form of slavery is to have a sense of inner validation that is not dependent on external events or other people’s opinions. How do we get such inner validation? Only through understanding. We need to understand why we and others are so desperate for each others’ approval. Looking gullible diminishes the survival intelligence of a person in other people’s eyes. And we may feel the same way about ourselves. The odd thing is, that by understanding these dynamics in great detail, they become less compelling. It’s a bit like understanding that a thunderstorm is not the anger of the Gods but an electrical discharge. The understanding diminishes the dread of thunderstorms.
It is quite possible to acquire such a sense of inner approval through understanding, such that the opinions of others matter less and less. This does not mean we become reckless and deliberately do things to diminish our standing in other peoples’ eyes. They are machines, as we all are, and need to be treated as such. If it is important that you look good in someone’s eyes then do what is necessary – but do it consciously, and not as a slave. Gurdjieff encapsulated all this through his concepts of internal and external considering – explained in great detail in Chapter 8 of In Search of the Miraculous.
The most powerful person on Earth is the one who has nothing to lose. If you want an excellent example, then the meeting between Alexander the Great and Diogenes is a classic. Alexander was the most powerful man on Earth, but having heard of Diogenes’ wisdom he paid him a visit. Diogenes had nothing other than a blanket and a small bag of food. He slept wherever he could. Alexander asked if there was anything he could do for Diogenes. In return Diogenes simply asked that Alexander move to one side because he was casting a shadow.
I think most of us, if paid a visit by today’s equivalent of Alexander the Great, would fall into all kinds of fawning and groveling behavior.
While a person believes they have something to lose they will be a slave to the opinions of others. Through long-term, intense work it is quite possible to manipulate the opinions of others to one’s own advantage if needed. Otherwise we simply don’t give a fuck.
THE HAPPINESS POLICE
Even as a child I would wonder why it was so important to smile on photographs. Why wasn’t my everyday expression acceptable? Why did we have to pretend to the world that we were the happiest family on planet Earth? And then when I got older, and particularly when I was at university, it became mandatory to have a “good time” with alcohol and to feign immeasurable happiness. In married life it was absolutely essential to smile on photos when on holiday, at a social event, or any other occasion for that matter – even a funeral.
Ask the average person in the street how things are going and they are likely to say “great” – or some such thing. And they will say this even if they have just learned they have cancer, have become bankrupt, or if their partner has run off with their personal trainer (they might be telling the truth in such an instance).
There is huge pressure on people to give an outward show of happiness – the smile, ecstatic holiday photos, mates having a good laugh – and so on. Of course, there is no criticism here of genuine jollity, but this need to portray to the world that we are ecstatically happy people is debilitating.
The reason you will be put under massive pressure to appear to be happy is simple. You are not allowed to reflect how people really feel, because most people are in pain and they will not thank you for reminding them of it. You will be called a “miserable git”, a “party pooper”, “party skunk”, “miserable bastard” – and so on. In reality you may be perfectly happy, but this isn’t the point. You are a miserable git if you don’t join in with the phony pretense that life is just one big ball, because you remind others of their true “miserable git” inner state. If someone calls you a miserable bastard you can be assured that they are the miserable ones. They just cannot bear to be reminded of it.
As with all things of this nature, it needs to be understood and handled appropriately. I’m quite happy to smile on a photograph if asked (and i do need to be asked). For two seconds I look like a cheshire cat, after which I resort to my bulldog chewing a wasp expression. I understand why people want others to look happy, and I understand why they can get quite aggressive if a person doesn’t play along. I will do the smiling thing for family and close friends. I will not do it for anyone else unless they are going to give me a large amount of money. In effect I will tell them to go away and leave me alone, and go play at happy chappies somewhere else.
We have to deal intelligently with the happiness police. Sometimes it is important to obey them, simply so we can have some form of family and social li
fe. At other times we can ignore them with impunity, even if they become offended beyond measure.
As always, the decision to acquiesce to the implied demand to look happy, or our decision to remain true to our inner feelings and tell the happiness police to go fuck themselves, both come at a price. We just have to be intelligent about how much we want to pay.
IS COMPASSION JUST SELF-INTEREST?
Why do human beings have a predisposition to compassion? It seems fairly unique and doesn’t manifest in the animal world. People do pick out instances that have been caught on camera where one animal seems to be helping another, but in the main the world of animals has been described as a carnival of carnage, and there seems to be no compassion displayed by the vast majority of creatures as they consume another while it is still alive.
I think we all understand what is meant by compassion. When one human being empathizes with the suffering of another and possibly makes efforts to reduce the suffering of the other, we would probably consider that to be an act of compassion. And of course compassion often extends to sentient creatures other than human beings.
I’ve come across two explanations of compassion that seem to make some sense. One is cold and analytical, and the other calls us to accept that compassion is a quality of character. The analytical approach is taken by Spinoza, and while I have often found it difficult to accept the aloofness of his analysis I actually think he is correct. The other is that of Schopenhauer, who sees compassion as a quality that depends on the character of the individual. I’ll concentrate on Spinoza’s analysis.
For Spinoza the body is where our powers reside. Even what we consider to be “thought” is a feature of the body. By thought he means language and images. The images we form in our mind affect the body and are part of the body. And so when we imagine something life threatening our body responds accordingly – some level of fear and apprehension maybe. This notion of “images” is very important to Spinoza, since an image is part of the body and affects the body. So when we see a creature in distress our brain forms an image that affects our body. The image is life diminishing and as such affects our own emotional state. This is compassion – an emotional state brought about by the image of another creature suffering that makes us feel diminished. As such, all compassion is an attempt to rectify our own pain.
Most people do not become distraught if they accidentally step on an ant. However if ants resembled tiny human beings the response might be quite different. For compassion to arise the creature that is suffering must have some resemblance to us, otherwise the image the mind forms would not make us feel diminished in some way. Animals with big, brown, round eyes evoke a compassionate response because they remind us of ourselves. The eye of a snake doesn’t really do it.
I have to admit that I have resisted Spinoza’s analysis, but I cannot deny the logic of it. All compassion is an attempt to reduce the suffering of a creature that reminds us of ourselves, and as such is an attempt to reduce our own pain.
INSANITY IS A FIXED IDEA
The saying that insanity is a fixed idea, or having a fixed idea, is an absolutely 100% accurate metric for any of us to determine how sane we are at any particular moment in time.
Now in our society, we're expected to be consistent, whatever consistent might mean. So, for example, you may always like going to a particular restaurant, and you may at some point kid yourself that you like going to this restaurant just to be consistent. You may get a shower every morning and just to be consistent, you may insist that you get a shower every morning, even though sometimes you may not want to. These are trivial things, more importantly, we assume ideas that are damaging when they become consistent. For example, I may say to myself that I believe in a certain religious or spiritual practice. Say that practice is only eating a very small amount whenever I have a meal, just because I believe that for some reason it is a good practice, even though possibly my body might suffer. I continue with that, and my body maybe suffers, so part of me starts yelling out inside that I need more food, but no, I persist with the idea that I shall eat very, very small portions of food, maybe just a few spoonfuls because I read somewhere that this is very good, a very good spiritual practice. Or I may have read that not expressing negative emotions is a very good idea. I persist with this notion of not expressing my anger, or fear, or hatred, or derision, or envy, and hey, guess what? Within a week and maybe not even that long, you're like a bomb ready to go off. But even so, you've adopted the idea, a fixed idea, on how you should behave in every circumstance and you go along with it. On the example of not expressing negative emotions, I once was told a very, very funny story. I'm not going to mention names, but the people concerned were two people who are very well known, they've written books, and one of them was a lady who was very independently spirited. Nobody could really tell her to do anything she just went her own way and this annoyed a lot of other people. And the other person was a guy, again, a very well known person, who just felt that things should be done exactly how his teacher had indicated that they should be done. And so this lady annoyed the crap out of him. And one day he just blew up and screamed at this woman, 'you fucking bitch.' These are legendary people in a well known spiritual movement, no expression of negative emotions - and it just came out like a volcanic explosion because he'd been building the whole thing up.
Back to the main point of not expressing negative emotions.Any fixed idea we might have about our behavior is actually a sign of insanity. Your body and your emotions are always true. You have no need to do anything with them. Your body reacts to the environment in the right way, it knows how to walk, it knows how to eat a meal, it knows how to laugh when you're amused, it knows how to do a million things, and it will just do them. And your emotions, in any circumstance, give you a true picture or a true representation of how you have reacted to life. So if someone insults you, you may feel angry, if someone says something very nice about you, you may feel flattered and so on. And the emotions are just a real-time barometer of how life is interacting with you. You have no reason to do anything with these things other than watch them. Do not interfere.
Interference is insanity; it's the pretense that your mind somehow knows better, that somehow it knows how you should react in a more appropriate manner to life circumstances. Your body already knows that your mind doesn't. Your mind is full of nonsense, stuff you've picked up from spiritual schools, from reading books, from what your mother told you, or your school teachers, and this conditions how you react to life, it's not your genuine reaction. Now it sounds like we can, by an act of will almost, stop all this inner dialogue and nonsense, all these little rules and modes behavior or ideas of behavior that we have and drop them. But it's not quite so easy because they've been there in there a long time, they're programmed in. Of course, what you'll start saying to yourself is 'I should not have these modes of behavior.' And guess what? Another little rule. So moving from the way we usually deal with life, which is very often through our heads, to react to life in a spontaneous way, to be part of life, is not an easy thing. But it can be achieved. And it's achieved typically through a process of observation. I've mentioned this in other places, that observation without judgment, without any attempt to change what's going on, is your key to freedom. Anything else, any egotistical interference in how your body and emotions are reacting to life are potentially a route to insanity - at least a route to mental illness, depression, or anxiety. What is depression? It's being 'depressed,' being constrained, contained. I knew someone who was very depressed. They had a form of compulsive behavior where everything around them had to be perfectly neat. It was childhood conditioning. And life very often doesn't want everything around us to be perfectly neat. And she just couldn't cope with this and as a result was very depressed.
The notion of just letting life flow within us as it wants to flow is very alien to people in the West. Not so alien to people in the East. And in fact, the Tao Te Ching and Taoism generally are all about that, about
just letting the whole thing flow. But again there we go, we've got another little rule, now 'I am going to let life flow,' and if you rigorously try to enforce that rule from your head, then you will end up being unhappy. All these rules do is make us unhappy. It's one of the reasons why many of the religions are in reality very, very cruel things, particularly in the West. They impose ideas on us as to how we should behave in life. Those ideas then suppress our natural behavior; when we should be happy, when we should be sad, when we should be angry, when we should love, when we should hate - all these rules, such as 'love your neighbor as yourself.' - well, if you can do that, I will come and bow down before you on my knees. That is a commandment that is largely meaningless to us, and trying to do it because you've been told to do it just will not work. You will end up just feeling like crap because you can't do it. So forget about all that conditioning. The key to the whole thing, to your inner freedom, is to observe. And if the observation becomes an idea, as opposed to a practice, then you have to observe that as well. If you're judging, then you observe the judgment. Life should really flow within you like a stream flows - downhill. It should just be a free movement, anything else and you're going to create pain and suffering for yourself. Anyway, whatever you do, don't make the content of this a fixed idea.
SHOULD, COULD, WOULD - THE THREE POISONS
The words “should”, “could” and “would” are poison. Things happen in the only way they can happen, unless of course you do not believe that life is driven by a chain of cause and effect. These three words have a fundamental assumption at their root – that of free-will. When we say we should have done something we are immediately implying that we have free will, and in the circumstances we are considering could have done differently. The word “should” is most often used in a negatives sense – regret, perceived failure and obligation. You should work harder. You should have locked your car and then it would not have been stolen. You should not lose your temper.
The Corporeal Fantasy Page 8